When we spent the weekend camping at Lions Den in the rain, we discovered our tent (a canvas tourer+ style) has a leak. This happened in the most annoying way possible - a constant drip from the top assembly down onto Jess' head and pillow. Of course it started at around 2am, so there was nothing else for it but to try and dodgy something up and more our mattresses out of the way.
I'm pretty cranky about the tent leaking, since it's only a year old, and still basically brand new. When we bought it we made sure to set it up in the backyard, and over the space of three days would soak it completely with the hose and let it dry out. This allows the canvas to shrink and the thread to expand, thus waterproofing the seams.
However, I think the problem that we're having stems from a basic design flaw with the tent. As a canvas tourer-style tent, it has an internal square frame at the top of the tent. The frame is inside the tent, which makes for a very easy and quick setup time. What I believe is happening is that once the canvas gets waterlogged, where the frame touches the external canvas it pulls the water through to the frame, where it then drips down. This is the same as if you put a bag or your feet against the waterlogged canvas - the contact "pulls" the water through the canvas and whatever's touching gets wet.
Dad had old canvas tourer style tents, and they had an external frame at the top. This was a pain in the backside to assemble each time, but they didn't have problems with the water coming through like we're having here. I'm not really sure what to do - I may yet email the manufacturers and see what they say.
Short of that though, I think I'll try some Scotchguard waterproofing spray on the top section. If that doesn't work, I guess the only thing for it is to set up a tarp as a fly over the tent, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a canvas tourer tent in the first place.
Some pictures of the problem areas:
You can see a drip forming on the corner section of the metal frame
If I do get around to emailing the manufacturer, I'll have to remember to ask them about an ongoing issue we have had with the retention of the back section of the tent. As ours is a Tourer+ style, it has the extra area at the rear to provide more space. This is retained by an external U-frame to hold the back out tight. However, the top corners seem to lack any nice way of attaching to the frame.
There's a nice thick webbing loop, but it has nothing to attach to on the frame:
So we end up using the small little ties to secure it to the frame and pull it taught. However, as you can see from the above photo, I don't think that they're designed for that, as they're very small and thus can't be attached too securely to the tent itself.
Because the U-frame is wider than the rear of the tent, one side inevitably ends up pulled further out than the other. You can clearly see here why we can't use the thick webbing straps to secure the back:
I don't think that the U-frame is too big - I think that the thick webbing straps were meant to be twice as long as they are, and would hook over the top of the lugs on the top of the corner sections.
All up, it's not an ideal situation, and may even be contributing to the leaking issue above, since we can't tension the canvas up properly for fear of tearing the thin tie strips completely off. Will have to see if we can come up with a better solution.
